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As I walked around SXSW and listened to the different presentations, I thought about how important it is to disengage from deadlines and commitments for a little while and consider new ideas and different perspectives. While “South by” is a great opportunity to do this, once a year isn’t nearly enough. It has to be continuous and ongoing. But how can you do that? It’s both easier and harder than it seems.

We’re all born curious. Think about your former 10-year-old self. Now think about your 10-year-old self going to school. If you’re like most people, school tried to beat that curiosity out of you in the pursuit of conformity, manageability, test scores, self-esteem or whatever their misguided agenda happened to be. So the first reason we don’t indulge our curiosity is because of school and the habits it ingrained in us: to converge to an answer, quickly and quietly, and then move on to the next problem.

The second reason is relevance. Don’t get me wrong; relevance is great. After all, there’s no meaningful communication without it. If you’re a marketer, then you’re a storyteller. You’re trying to create intimacy with people you’ll likely never meet, and relevance is the currency you use for trade.

But in a different context, relevance is like gravity. You don’t see it, don’t think about it and don’t really know it’s there. But it’s holding you down, quietly ensuring you learn more about the stuff you already know.

Take the Internet, for example. Google built the biggest money fountain anyone’s ever seen by creating a slightly better relevance engine than the other guys. Amazon is doing the same thing. And Facebook and Twitter. And Pandora. “People who bought this also bought that.” “If you like the White Stripes, you’ll like the Black Keys.”

To escape gravity’s hold, we have to do more than just interact with what’s conveniently presented to us. We have to make concerted efforts to interact with the unknown, to follow connections and to explicitly indulge our curiosity. Less Facebook; more Wikipedia.

For example, in a few minutes, and without even leaving Wikipedia, you can travel from the Tasmanian Devil to Tasmanian devils to Tasmanian tigers to thylacines to convergent evolution. And now you’ve just crossed the threshold from things to ideas, from the concrete noun “thylacine” to the idea of “convergent evolution.” That’s an important moment because now you can start to use that idea to think about other things: your business, your customers, your competitors, whatever.

But, you can reach this moment only if you indulge your curiosity—interact with the unknown.

Embrace some randomness: Put strange things in your RSS reader. Toss aside the latest best-selling business screed and pick up some books by dead people. (“The deader, the better.”) Be curious, omnivorous and promiscuous.

But most of all, try to avoid the trap of someone else’s idea of relevance.